What, you want them in Altarian Dollars? Can't do, as they no longer exist. I wouldn't bother with Triganic Pu, that has too many problems. Or how about one Ningis, you can get eight of those for one Pu, but nobody has ever rich enough to own one Pu so it isn't worth thinking about.

It's somewhat similar to how they destroyed 1950s and 60s television tapes.

That wasn't due to archiving, or even expensive tape, though. That was due to copyright. In the 70s and 80s there was a big scare that home taping would kill the TV industry (MPAA sponsored, of course) and that as Networks could store shows on tape, they might just replay them over and over again, driving down the need for new material. So the TV producers' and actors' unions (or whatever they were) made strict rules about how long material could be stored for and how many times it could be shown. The resul

I'm not sure any entire series were lost as in some cases episodes survived due to people making unlawful copies at home (or in some cases, the actual tapes being "stolen" by producers etc. to save them), but yes; there are dozens, possibly hundreds of episodes of UK television from the 60s and 70s that no longer exist in any format.

The BBC announced last month it would remove the sites from the web as part of cuts to its £34million online budget. It is also axing 360 staff.

and

While the torrent was created anonymously, some sources have suggested that the person behind it is Ben Metcalfe, also known as dotBen, who posted a link to the archive on Twitter with the message: ‘So here it is... if you want to download the torrent backup of all the sites the BBC are closing.’
Metcalfe is a former BBC software engineer, who helped launch the BBC blog network, now living in the US.

FTFY. Sunk costs are still relevant when retrospectively evaluating performance, which I think is what MrQuacker is getting at.

Not that the criticism is necessarily aimed at the BBC. A major source of waste and inefficiency where government is involved (and to a lesser degree at any large organisation), is the uncertainty introduced by politicians continually changing the landscape. The websites may have offered good value for money at the time of purchase and everything may have gone to plan at the BBC en

Well, if you read the article, you find a link: "You can read the full background to the story here [http://178.63.252.42/]." Look up 178.63.252.42 at ripe.org and you find it's owned by spacerich.com. Visit spacerich.com and you see in large, friendly letters: "Virtual Private Servers from $3.99/month"

I'm pretty sure the poster was trying to make a stupid joke, and failing miserably because almost nobody gives a shit about "PIN number", "FTP protocol", and all the other such things that get some people worked up into a frenzy.

See i says "VPS server", which would be "Virtual Private Server server", Which like an "FTP server" is a server that provides FTP must be a server that provides VPSs in other words a reasonably capable real server. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Actually, Its that if you actively receive TV signals that you have to pay the licence fee, and even then you only need one. Better than the alternative, advertisement flooded, channels that dont rely on public funding.

Actually, the wording is that one has to "receive broadcasts as they are transmitted". If you want to argue that iPlayer programmes are TV signals then this distinction is important. I watch perhaps 2 hours of TV programming per week using iPlayer and sometimes 4OD so I don't pay a license fee. If I want to watch something else I'll just go to a streaming site or my DVD collection.

(In the UK, if you own a device that can receive TV signals, you HAVE to have a TV license which the BBC gets funds from)

No. In the UK, iff you use a device to watch television as it is broadcast then your residence has to have a TV licence. A TV used for CCTV, amateur television or watching DVDs does not create a requirement for a licence. A computer used for iPlayer's "Watch live" service does create a requirement for a licence.

A license is some American invention which you probably need to jaywalk from the sidewalks to the theater.

Could be worse. The German equivalent is similar but a tad crazier.There you're also required to have a license if the device is just capable of receiving publicly funded TV or radio (allowing them to grab money from more people and extend the whole thing to online-capable devices which could theoretically be used to access their online streaming content).

Yeah, that's where I'd draw the line and consider the licence unacceptable.

A well regulated TV licence funds a broadcast service separate from and balancing against dominant commercial interests. If Murdoch, say, is given a licence to broadcast on some frequency (parts of the e-m spectrum not being in any reasonable way ownable) then in return for exclusive access to broadcast on this frequency he and his customers must accept that the people get to have something to challenge a service acting in his intere

Regulation (of another sort) has intervened to specifically prevent Murdoch's ownership of certain terrestrial broadcasters. Sky 3 sure is doing a good job of reaching the DVB-T-connected TV I'm sitting in front of, and most terrestrial broadcasters remain under private ownership.

the frequencies can be reused by other broadcasters. Indeed this is exactly what happens; if you point your dish in a different direction you can receive broadcasts from different satellites on other frequencies.

The fact that a signal is directional doesn't mean Murdoch gets any more natural right to ownership of the spectrum. There's no cone extending from his satellite a few centimetres down into the ground through everyone's property wh

The point is, your argument that Murdoch's broadcasts somehow justify the licence fee is more than a bit crazy.

You've omitted the reasoning between "your argument" and "more than a bit crazy" - would you mind providing it? Perhaps it'll give me a better warning of the kind of bullshit Cameron will come up with to further diminish the BBC.

If you want to talk about debts to society, then look no further than the BBC. What does the BBC owe us, the public, for the priviledge of owning all those buildings,

Sorry, did they steal your house or something? Also, priviledge (n): the precipice your envious detractor perceives you on and wants to push you off so he can take your place.

huge amounts of the broadcasting spectrum,

It doesn't "own" - it has an exclusive right to do certain things with it. This ability was earnt through a

Let me try one final time to explain what I'm getting at. A thought experiment: suppose things are somehow reversed, and Murdoch's television stations become the BBC. How do you feel about having to pay Mr Rupert Murdoch just in order to watch broadcast over-the-air TV?

Now, you're a defender of the licence fee, so of course you still approve of this on principle, right?

No. There's no private individual which gets to own and control the licence payer money. Approving of a corporation managed by a trust is not the same as approving a franchise for the personal benefit of a private individual (or public-private partnerships in general).

And it's "democracy" because the elected government granted him this exclusive franchise.

No. Giving high level control of some aspect of public service to private business is not democratic. Public ownership of public services is a necessary component of democratic government. (No, a decision isn't democratic just because some maj

[mode="pedantic"] The geostationary orbit is by definition not above Europe, since Europe is not on the equator.[/mode]
If, for example, the channels are on the Astra 2 satellite, they are at 19.2 degrees longtitude east. This means they are above Congo [google.com], and due south from central europe.

So, what you're saying is that to reprint a book costs wildly less than to produce a book? That an electronic copy with no attempts to guarantee availability is much cheaper than a resilient set of servers which deliver instantly and accessibly to goodness-knows-how-many-people per minute? And that the cheapest thing of all is to do so without asking anyone's permission?

Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC. But OP is attention whoring with a cheap technical demonstrati

Firstly, the privatisation began years ago under New Tories - the worst hit from a geeky PoV being selling of infrastructure to Siemens.

Secondly, the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television.

Thirdly, anyone who thinks that this round of government cost cutting is even slightly relevant to getting out of recession is an idiot. Money is wasted because government acts as an agent for private benefactors, in particular (i) units are sold off and services contracted back to well-back-scratched government officials at profit; (ii) money invested in private wars, trade and military, under the guise of "free trade" or defence of the realm. Much of our debt represents investment in banks from which (if we do things right) we stand to make huge profit once we've sold off again.

Finally, government debt per se is not bad - it acts as a mirror private wealth of creditors. What matters is whether debt is sustainable. The approach after WW2 to a record level of debt was to invest more to grow local technology, industry and services. The approach today is to burn all society's bridges for firewood. Thatcher executed round one, and Cameron prepares kindling for remaining edifices. Then there's nothing left, and Britain will have got exactly what she asked for.

the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television

A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.
The licence fee is a compulsory tax on anyone who watches broadcast TV, whether or not they consume or even care about BBC services. Now I'm not saying that I don't enjoy BBC output, or even that I necessarily resent paying the licence fee, but please don't try to use weasel words and pretend it's something it isn't. It might be a special purpose tax and the money it generates might be ring fenced, but it's a tax and the BBC is a public body.

A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.

You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.

Scrapping Trident is a valid cost-cutting measure when the government has decided that it's overspending on unnecessary shit during a recession: if you scrap Trident, you suddenly have a few 10s of billions more GBP to allocate other than against an imaginary enemy who is already being sufficiently resisted.

Even tax on fags and booze goes to central government. The extra taxation isn't allocated for health or policiing services for cancer patients and drunks.

But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.

What is more, I regard the licence fee as the cost the viewer pays for (i) the content produced by the BBC; (ii) even if he chooses not to watch the BBC, the permission given by the people to private broadcasters to use parts of the e-m spectrum (and other artificial/natural monopolies) to broadcast stuff in their interests. The "cost" in this case is the right for the people to provide a counterpoint - something sorely lacking, in, say, the bastion of free press that is the USA.

The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.

You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.

Uh, the definition of a tax is that it is compulsory, and nobody is going to force you to eat. AFAICT, starving yourself is the only legal way to commit suicide in most jurisdictions.

But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.

In the last license fee review, the BBC was given responsibility for funding the World Service, S4C and BBC Monitoring, as well as providing funding for setting up local TV services and various other schemes - all while the license fee was held at its current rate. In other words, the Government offloaded a load of its own expenditure onto the BBC without increasing the BBCs funding, meaning that not only do the Government save its own money, it forces the BBC to reduce costs.

Although the GP post was a bit harsh, there is no denying that the BBC, one of the great institutions of British society, is biased as an institution. It has been admitted repeatedly by the BBC over the years on various matters (and you don't have to read it in the Daily Mail). Perhaps the first one I quote from 1994 helps explain the others.

No institution is unbiased and representative all the time on everything - it's an impossible ideal. The best it can do is continuously to try to discover bias and disproportionate representation, publish its findings and take corrective action. You've given examples of how the BBC does that (and Murdoch never will).

There's a difference between showing bias and being unrepresentative, of course. It is one thing to be disproportionately represented by gays and ethnic minorities - the latter ties in with a hi

The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.

The BBC speaks for nobody except the Guardian-reading leftists who work for it. They consistently monster any Conservative (or lately LibDem) who appears on their programmes while giving Labour an easy ride and packing the audiences of shows like Question Time with baying Trotskyites.
"people's counterbalance"... don't make me laugh!

Question Time audiences are designed to give a fair representation of the local population - they're not "packed" at all.
The BBC balances the private media (well, News International, since they control 90% of the UK's print and TV media that's not the BBC). When Labour was in power, The Sun newspaper fell over themselves worshipping New Labour and the BBC counterbalanced that. Now that we have a Lib Dem/Conservative coalition, BBC balances the now blatantly, staunchly Tory-loving media output. Thus th

The radio counterpart Any Questions? was hosted by one of my old schools and was "packed" with, well, mostly parents and students of the school. I live in a constituency which hasn't seen a Labour MP since before I was born, and the audience represented an even more well-off Tory-leaning set than was regular for the area.

I shan't ask you for proof of your assertion because it's obvious you're trolling in the guise of a well-known British stereotype.

The funny thing about the BBC is that when the Tories are in power they are accused of being to the left whereas when labour were in power they were accused of being to the right. You just like to feel victimised.

Looking at it from a neutral standpoint the BBC are by far the most balanced provider of news in the UK and quite possibly Worldwide.

OK, assuming you regard the Palestinian cause as "left wing" and the Israeli as "right wing"... how about the report by the BBFC (sic) president [guardian.co.uk] remarking that the BBC did not adequately convey the Palestinians' unequal relationship with Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict? The report was quite clear that Palestinians in certain territories are living under Israeli occupation, a fact recognised by the UN including Britain (at least officially), but the BBC - in giving context - was considered slow to assert

So, what you're saying is that to reprint a book costs wildly less than to produce a book?

Websites aren't books.

That an electronic copy with no attempts to guarantee availability is much cheaper than a resilient set of servers which deliver instantly and accessibly to goodness-knows-how-many-people per minute?

Yes, electronic copies don't cost Auntie anything, which is sort of the point.

And that the cheapest thing of all is to do so without asking anyone's permission?

If he's british then the matter of permission is a grey one: having paid his license fee it could be argued that he has a right to this material and making it available to other Britons is merely an extension. Of course, sticking it on BT for all to grab would complicate matters but I don't see Auntie getting her knickers in too much of a twist.

Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC. But OP is attention whoring with a cheap technical demonstration which alienates him from the very people he might think he is supporting.

He is not alone, archive.org and I expect many others have done the same thing. It is trivial to do with free software from your own PC at no cost.

I'm sure the BBC will keep copies too. The pages will be removed from the web but we are talking about data that can easily fit on a USB flash drive. The BBC probably has some kind of long term archival system too, e.g. tape. No-one wants a repeat of the video tape wiping debacle of the 70s.

"It is never your duty to violate copyright! You must dispose of the materials immediately! Who cares if the originator feels like letting them sink into oblivion! That is their glorious prerogative as copyright holder while you, the consumer get to moan in anguish at what might have been saved!"

I wouldn't call this attention whoring. Attention whoring involves being a whore. Neither the person who made the copy of the sites, nor the author of this post, are attempting to receive anything for what they have done.

Nonsense. Ben Metcalfe [twitter.com] is a somewhat bitter ex-BBC employee [benmetcalfe.com] and his reward is reputation (as it often is on the Interwebs). TFA, his web site and about 20 seconds' worth of mouse clicks between them make this clear.

I mean "far future" in Internet terms of course, so like a few decades. Otherwise I'll be dead and there will either be a new "library of Alexandria" containing all human knowledge and data, or more likely, you'll have bigger, sci-fi-novelish problems to worry about.

The real reason the BBC is cutting back on its online presence is hidden pressure from the commercial sector who have always seen it as a threat to their revenue. "News Corporation's James Murdoch has said that a "dominant [bbc.co.uk]" BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK". Of course we all know what kind of 'independent' journalism he really means. One where some Australian pornographer decides who gets to be president or Primeminister.

"James Murdoch, son of Rupert and the man in charge of BSkyB has criticised the BBC iPlayer, insisting that the popular online VOD service is squashing competition" link [techradar.com]

I assumed it was because they're going to be scaling back their new online output to save money, and want to reduce how bad that looks. Either they have a sparse site where there's a bare minimum of content, or they have the same sparse site alongside a huge sprawling matrix of brilliant ideas to constantly remind people of the kind of incredible projects the BBC used to spearhead online.

Theres a very noticable left wing bias at the BBC, especially on Radio 4. We need right wingers like murdoch to provide balance.

You mean like the "balance" you can get from Fox "news" in the USA? Wasn't there reports on this site that Fox news viewers are the most misinformed, and the company won a court battle that meant they were an enternainment channel and didn't have to worry about facts. I'd rather news be accurate, not half made up. It's not what I'd call balance; lies would be a more descriptive term.

Wasn't there reports on this site that Fox news viewers are the most misinformed

After watching different news stations, I suspect Fox News viewers are more misinformed. However, the "study" which was bandied out in the press "proving" it several years back was hardly proof. It based its conclusions on asking viewers biased questions like "Did the U.S. find WMDs in Iraq?" Of course conservative viewers are going to be more "misinformed" about that. Just like more liberal viewers would be more "misinform

To come up with a bulletproof study on how misinformed news viewers are, you need to be asking them questions which are free from any confirmation bias [wikipedia.org]. Stuff like "the Prime Minister of the U.K. is...?" or "The African nation which recently voted to split is...?" Questions which favor or disfavor one political or social group's viewpoint won't work, and is more indicative of the researchers' bias rather than the viewers'. (Ideally you'd also control for socio-economic factors like education level, available time to watch the news, etc.)

That sounds like a pretty awesome study, I must say! Whether anyone would actually run it is another question. I mean, you could try an online questionnaire, but people could just Google the questions to find the answers, and any news agency that might have the resources to get it out to many people, would suffer from being mostly limited to whatever their main audience is.

There's a Census coming around the UK soon this year, which would be a good way to get a lot of coverage, however I suspect its already

BBC features have a bit of a bias, but the hard news is straight-up, objective journalism. Your claim that Murdoch, whose media have been proven to slant and misrepresent hard news, will provide "balance" us complete, utter bullshit.

I don't mean balance in the sense of providing the truth, but if you are fed left wing bias and right wing bias then somewhere in the middle lies the truth which hopefully someone could figure out.

eg: If what you hear from the BBC is poor palestinians , look at those nasty israelis and from News Corp you hear poor israelis look at those nasty palestinians then its a fair bet that neither side is acting properly and there has been injustice done to both.

That way, unfortunately, lies the error of false equivalence, if not worse. For example, the death toll of innocent civilians on either side of that dispute is so incredibly lopsided that to imply any correlation is grossly inaccurate.

And then there's the US practice of getting a scientist and a fundamentalist preacher to argue the merits of the Theory of Evolution. There is no "truth somewhere in the middle". There is a valid scientific theory, and there is primitive superstition.

You're completely wrong. That's anything BUT a straw man argument. Every news channel discusses such issues in exactly the way I described, when they are topical. An American example concerns the effort of certain states to force the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in science classrooms. Inevitably, that argument centres precisely on why Evolution is a legitimate scientific theory, while Intelligent Design is simply religion traveling under false colours. I saw that example on a hard news show, by th

I don't mean balance in the sense of providing the truth, but if you are fed left wing bias and right wing bias then somewhere in the middle lies the truth which hopefully someone could figure out.

No, that's like saying the color balance on a photograph you've taken is off, so to compensate you just oversaturate the other colors wildly and crank up the contrast. You don't wind up with a balanced middle road that produces a good picture. What you wind up with is, at best, a hideous parody of your original picture, consisting of recognizable forms, per se, but with no gradients of color and frequently the wrong colors to begin with, each of which are separated by huge gulfs of empty voids where the c

The same thing is going on in Germany. Our public broadcasting system was modeled after the BBC. The same huge media lobby groups comically defending independent journalism (yeah, right).

As a result, the public broadcasters now have a list of criteria that everything they publish online has to conform with; the list is narrow enough that they're required to remove a huge amount of stuff from the archives -- aparently as much as 80%. They're also constantly under fire for everything they introduce, eg. smartphone apps. There was an effort to mirror data before it was deleted (@depub), but all the domains are dead, nobody seems to really know what happened to it. Couldn't find a torrent on the Pirate Bay, either.

But seriously it would be a great clause in the copyright scheme that if a copyrighted work is taken out of distribution it should automatically go public domain. Otherwise publishers can simply delete history like those old racist Warner Brothers videos they keep taking down from Youtube.

If the person who did is is a UK citizen who pays their taxes and TV license fee, then they can argue they are a legitimate owner of the BBC, and therefore are protecting their assets. As one of the other 26 million or so other owners, I support the intent, however misguided it may have been in terms of strict interpretation of the copyright laws.

But seriously it would be a great clause in the copyright scheme that if a copyrighted work is taken out of distribution it should automatically go public domain. Otherwise publishers can simply delete history like those old racist Warner Brothers videos they keep taking down from Youtube.

Disney would never let it happen. A big part of their revenue is based on burying beloved moves so that they do not end up in Walmart's $5 bin, and they can demand full price for the anniversary edition of a thirty year old movie. Apparently, creating artificial shortages is good for business.

For govt produced media I'd agree with you, in the OP I was really speaking about corporate owned media which is what most of our television broadcasts are made up of. Generally corporations use copyrights to assert control over their creations which would be fine if they were trying to sell them, but at times they seek to destroy them or hide their mistakes using copyright as a shield. If you do some searching for racist cartoons you'll find a lot of examples of a constant back and forth with people post

I don't know how fast, if at all, the BBC will resort to legal action over this. I have heard there is an unofficial not-spoken-about semi-agreement that people who share old Doctor Who episodes (that they destroyed and fans have reconstructed) are allowed to carry on their business, so long as they don't try to make any money out of it. If they're not going to do anything about these websites anymore apart from delete them, this seems like it could be a similar situation.

I was wondering the same thing. Given the vintage of most of it, there are probably a few CGI scripts that will need to be picked up if the idea is that someone could bring the sites back to life at some future date. Once a cure has been found.

1. People shouldn't assume that this means that shutting the websites would have only saved £3.99 from the BBC budget. Given large orgs and the cost mulitpliers for internally supported servers, it could well be tens of thousands of pounds per year.

2. Instead of people like Ben Goldacre [badscience.net] boo-hooing and expecting the government (which the BBC is effectively an arm of) to save the sites, he could have shelled out the £4 and done it himself. Could it be that - GASP - sometimes governments aren't the best way to get things done?:-O